Science under Threat? A Natural Experiment in Economics

2026-08-14

AI Summary

This study investigates how political pressure reshapes academic research content. Leveraging the 2025 U.S. sensitive terminology blacklist as an exogenous shock, we employ a difference-in-differences framework combined with textual analysis to quantify the causal effect of federal funding dependence on economists’ scholarly expression for the first time. Results indicate that scholars with high funding reliance significantly avoid discourse on gender, race, and environmental issues, with this chilling effect exhibiting substantial heterogeneity across departmental prestige and author demographics. By innovatively utilizing sensitive word lists to identify political intervention, this paper elucidates the micro-level mechanisms and structural disparities through which resource constraints compromise academic freedom, offering novel empirical evidence on the intersection of political economy and scientific communication.

Abstract

Academic freedom has come under growing strain worldwide. To study whether and how academics respond to political pressure, we exploit a natural experiment: the publication in early 2025 of a "blacklist" of words flagged by the U.S. government. We find that the release of this list led to a sharp reduction in the use of these flagged words among economists at universities that rely heavily on federal funding, relative to scholars from institutions that are less dependent on federal funding or based in the UK. The drop is driven by content related to gender, race, and environment. We show that changes are not simply semantic but reflect actual paper content and that neither the individual funding status nor time-invariant author characteristics are driving the effects. We also document interesting heterogeneous effects by department quality and author gender and ethnicity. Our findings are consistent with the idea that scholars respond strongly to political pressure.

Problem

• Academic freedom
• Political pressure
• Self-censorship
• Economics research

Innovation

• Natural Experiment
• Academic Freedom
• Political Pressure
• Causal Inference
• Heterogeneous Effects